Fellows
Founding Fellows of the Erpenbach Institute (2026)
Laura McGillicuddy and Swapnil Gaikwad were selected as the Founding Fellows of the inaugural Erpenbach Institute Fellowship cohort.
Their independent contributions respond to a shared question:
Can something appear unchanged and yet fundamentally change?
Working from two distinct fields of practice, both contributions concern how visible continuity can conceal fundamental changes in authority, identity and responsibility.
The Human in Control: How AI Can Relocate Judgement While Responsibility Appears Unchanged
Laura McGillicuddy is an AI governance and human–AI interaction researcher based in Northern Ireland. She holds an MSc in Artificial Intelligence from Queen's University Belfast, an MA in Psychological Studies from the University of Glasgow, and a BSc in Computer Science from Ulster University. Her work examines how AI systems shape human judgement, trust, agency and accountability, combining technical model evaluation with psychology, responsible AI and twelve years of production automation experience. She is also a NeurIPS 2026 Ethics Reviewer and writes on AI ethics, governance and sociotechnical change.
What should happen at the boundary of what a record can prove
Swapnil Gaikwad works on verification and accountability infrastructure for AI systems. He holds a Master of Science in Data Science from the University of Western Australia, where he was awarded the Global Excellence Scholarship and received a distinction for work on spiking neural networks for acoustic traffic monitoring. He is the sole engineer behind Helmric, a verification layer that checks AI output against declared source material using a fixed entailment classifier rather than a generative model, and produces cryptographically signed records an outside party can verify independently and offline. His research concerns the boundary between what a record can prove and what is actually the case, and the conditions under which a record counts as evidence about a system rather than output from it. He is based in Perth, Western Australia.